Tips & Tricks

By now it’s pretty common knowledge that you can grab a screenshot from any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch simply by pressing the home and sleep/wake buttons simultaneously, saving a PNG image of whatever is on the current screen to your on-device photo library. While this works well enough in most cases, sometimes the necessary finger gymnastic can make it a bit tricky to capture more complicated screenshots, such as when playing a game or trying to capture a “peek” screen from a 3D Touch gesture.

Although the iPhone has been able to take still photos while recording videos for a while now, you have to think about it at the time. The good news, though, is that if you’ve ever found yourself wanting to grab a still image from one of your iPhone videos after the fact, it’s actually pretty easy to do this using the macOS Photos app.

If you’ve got an Apple Watch on your wrist, you’re probably already familiar with Glances — those useful summaries of information from built-in and third-party apps. What you may not realize, however, is that you can call up specific glances by name with Siri — even glances that aren’t included in your list of active glances.

The aerial screensavers available on the new Apple TV make for a refreshing change from the photo-based screen savers of prior versions; currently Apple offers up 34 different screensavers covering five specific locations around the world: China, Hawaii, London, New York, and San Francisco. Rather than storing the screensavers permanently as part of tvOS, the Apple TV downloads new screensaver footage from Apple’s servers on a schedule. If you find that your screensavers are getting stale, you can increase how often the Apple TV downloads new content from Apple’s servers by going into the Apple TV Settings app and choosing General, Screensaver.

You may already know how to enable the Emoji keyboard in iOS so you can use it in the Messages app on your iPhone or iPad, but did you know you can also access and use the same Emoji characters in Messages on OS X? In most Mac apps, including Messages, simply go to the Edit menu and choose Special Characters, or press OPT+CMD+T, to bring up the Characters pallet; you can access all of the same Emoji characters as on iOS, organized by category, simply by selecting “Emoji” from the menu on the left of this window. This feature is particularly useful for keeping a consistent chat experience if you use iMessage with Emoji and regularly switch between your Mac and iOS device.